The entire poem, from the dark wood to the Empyrean, traces the gradually transcendent view of Dante on his own culture, his own country, and even his own family, from the isolated and alienated bewilderment of the pilgrim in the first scene to the soaring view of the eagle in the upper reaches of the universe. It is characteristic of Dante and of his faith that any such transcendence must begin with the self; Dante’s own history occupies the central cantos of the Paradiso in the form of his meeting with his ancestor, Cacciaguida. The encounter is based on Aeneas’ meeting with Anchises, his father, in the sixth book of the Aeneid and has for its principal function the clarification of all of the dark prophecies the pilgrim has received throughout his journey concerning the future course of his life. As early as the sixth canto of the Inferno, he had been warned about future exile and misery in ambiguous terms; in the canto of Cacciaguida it is spelled out for him “not in dark oracles ... but in clear words”:

You will come to learn how bitter as salt and stone is the bread of others, how hard the way that goes up and down stairs that are never your own.

In spite of the formal resemblance to an ancient model, the mode of the revelation is distinctively biblical, as the phrase “dark oracles” and the context suggests. As the coming of Christ gave meaning retrospectively to all of history, so the revelation of Cacciaguida, a surrogate for the divine perspective in the poem, gives meaning to all of the prophecies in the poem.

The essential thing about an oracular utterance is that it contains the truth without revealing it; only in retrospect, after the fact, can its truth be appreciated. At the same time, when those ancient oracles deal with death, their truth can be tested only from beyond the grave, that is, when their truth is too late to be of value to humans. The coming of Christ changed all of this, for Christians, by providing a point of closure, an ending in time within time, an Archimedean place to stand from which the truth in life and in world history might be judged. It was therefore a death-and-resurrection perspective on the oracular utterance, at once an understanding and a survival. This mode of structuring history according to the Christ event forms the basis of Dantesque revelation in the poem: to tell the story of one’s life in retrospect with confidence in the truth and the completeness of the story is somehow to be outside of, or beyond, one’s own life. It is to undergo a kind of death and resurrection, the process of conversion, a recapitulation of the Christ event in the history of the individual soul. The retrospective illumination of Dante’s own life by Cacciaguida is the dramatization of the poet’s self-transcendence, the achievement of a place to stand from which the course of time, its trajectory, may be viewed as though it were completed.

It was St. Augustine in his Confessions who first drew the analogy between the unfolding of syntax and the flow of human time. As words move toward their conclusion in a sentence in order to arrive at meaning and as the sentences flow toward the poem’s ending in order to give it meaning, so the days of a man’s life flow toward his death, the moment of closure that gives meaning to his life. Meaning in history is revealed in the same way, from the standpoint of the ending of history or Apocalypse, to use the biblical term. The same analogy is operative in Dante’s poem, which is why the Paradiso is inseparable from the earlier cantiche. As we approach the poem’s ending (and, incidentally, the literal ending of the poet’s life), the closure that gives meaning to the verses and to the life that they represent, so all of history is reviewed under the aspect of eternity, beginning with Adam and ending with an indeterminate triumph of Justice on earth.

As the dark prophecies concerning the poet’s life are given meaning by the revelation of Cacciaguida, so the dark political struggles which are a counterpoint to the pilgrim’s story throughout his voyage are finally revealed, in a way that no historian today would consider historical. Indeed, the ultimate structure of history, from the perspective of paradise, would seem to be the very opposite of the history we learn from the chronicles. St. Peter’s invective against the corruption of the Church, for example, insists three times on the sacredness of his chair in Rome, which from his perspective appears to be empty, when we know it to have been filled, during the fictional time of the poem, by Boniface VIII, perhaps the most secularly powerful Pope of the Middle Ages. Again, we know that Henry VII of Luxemburg, upon whose entry into Italy Dante had placed so much of his hope for the restoration of the Empire, died rather miserably in 1313, eight years before the poet’s death and the conclusion of the poem. Yet, Dante awards him the very highest place among contemporaries in the heavenly spheres. This is the implication of Beatrice’s remark in Canto XXX as she points out an empty throne:

That great throne with the crown already set above it draws your eyes. To it shall come-before your own call to this nuptial banquet—the soul, already anointed, of Henry the Great, who will come to Italy to bring law and order before the time is ripe to set things straight.

In the last phrase, “before the time is ripe,” Dante almost casually points up the difference between fallen time and the fullness of time that is the Christian eternity. Henry’s death seems the merest accident of history, in no way affecting its meaning, as the presence and continued existence of a powerful Pope, Dante’s bitter enemy on earth, is inconsequential under the aspect of eternity.

One of the last figures used by Dante in order to describe his transcendent view of universal history and of his own life seems particularly contemporary in an age when the view from the stars is no longer a poetic dream but a reality. In the heaven of the fixed stars, as the poet looks down from his constellation, Gemini, he describes the entire terrestrial surface:

And turning there with the eternal Twins, I saw the dusty little threshing ground that makes us ravenous for our mad sins, saw it from mountain crest to lowest shore. Then I turned my eyes to Beauty’s eyes once more.

The convulsions of war and cataclysm are contained and almost domesticated by the figure of the threshing floor on which the winnowing is a contained violence with a purpose: the separation of the wheat from the chaff, the traditional biblical figure for judgment. At the same time, the pronoun “us” strains to have it both ways: the pilgrim is elevated far enough beyond human concerns to give him a perspective that seems supernatural, but the pronoun involves him in the fate of the whole human community so that even in the starry heaven he is not alone. This integration of the pilgrim into the human family, after the isolation of the dark wood, points to an essential feature of this poem and to the central paradox of the faith to which it bears witness: the Incarnation.

The last stages of the poem prepare the way for the final resolution of all paradoxes in terms of the paradox of the Incarnation. First of all, it should be observed that the final revelation that comes to the pilgrim is not simply Beatific Vision, but a vision of the principle that renders intelligible the union of humanity and divinity in the person of Christ. This mystery forms the basis, in Dante’s view, for all of the “concrete universals” involved in the story as well as in the poem itself.